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Quantitative plant proteomics using hydroponic isotope labeling of entire plants (HILEP)
Further Developments on a Vibration-Free Helium-Hydrogen Sorption Cooler
In our continuous effort on the development of a passively precooled two-stage 4.5 K / 14.5 K helium-hydrogen sorption cooler, a number of important development steps were made. Firstly, an improved high-density activated carbon was used for the fabrication of four new sorption cells. Tests with these new cells showed that because of increased efficiency, the required passive radiator area for this cooler reduced by a factor of 1.3. Secondly, it was shown that this cooler architecture can easily be used to reach lower (or higher) temperatures. Without hardware changes, the cold temperature was reduced from 4.5 K to 3.1 K. Thirdly, long-term experiments were carried out on the cooler. In two separate periods of two and four months of continuous operation, no change at all was observed in the cooler performance. Fourthly, clogging effects were analyzed that occurred after a 15 months storage period of the cooler at 300 K. We concluded that hydrogen diffusion out of the stainless steel components should be prevented. Finally, a design of an integrated compact cooler chain was presented, which consists of a 50 K Stirling cooler and the helium-hydrogen sorption cooler. This package may be used in the future to test the sorption cooler technology in a zero-gravity environment
Black Hole Spin via Continuum Fitting and the Role of Spin in Powering Transient Jets
The spins of ten stellar black holes have been measured using the
continuum-fitting method. These black holes are located in two distinct classes
of X-ray binary systems, one that is persistently X-ray bright and another that
is transient. Both the persistent and transient black holes remain for long
periods in a state where their spectra are dominated by a thermal accretion
disk component. The spin of a black hole of known mass and distance can be
measured by fitting this thermal continuum spectrum to the thin-disk model of
Novikov and Thorne; the key fit parameter is the radius of the inner edge of
the black hole's accretion disk. Strong observational and theoretical evidence
links the inner-disk radius to the radius of the innermost stable circular
orbit, which is trivially related to the dimensionless spin parameter a_* of
the black hole (|a_*| < 1). The ten spins that have so far been measured by
this continuum-fitting method range widely from a_* \approx 0 to a_* > 0.95.
The robustness of the method is demonstrated by the dozens or hundreds of
independent and consistent measurements of spin that have been obtained for
several black holes, and through careful consideration of many sources of
systematic error. Among the results discussed is a dichotomy between the
transient and persistent black holes; the latter have higher spins and larger
masses. Also discussed is recently discovered evidence in the transient sources
for a correlation between the power of ballistic jets and black hole spin.Comment: 30 pages. Accepted for publication in Space Science Reviews. Also to
appear in hard cover in the Space Sciences Series of ISSI "The Physics of
Accretion onto Black Holes" (Springer Publisher). Changes to Sections 5.2,
6.1 and 7.4. Section 7.4 responds to Russell et al. 2013 (MNRAS, 431, 405)
who find no evidence for a correlation between the power of ballistic jets
and black hole spi
Measuring Black Hole Spin using X-ray Reflection Spectroscopy
I review the current status of X-ray reflection (a.k.a. broad iron line)
based black hole spin measurements. This is a powerful technique that allows us
to measure robust black hole spins across the mass range, from the stellar-mass
black holes in X-ray binaries to the supermassive black holes in active
galactic nuclei. After describing the basic assumptions of this approach, I lay
out the detailed methodology focusing on "best practices" that have been found
necessary to obtain robust results. Reflecting my own biases, this review is
slanted towards a discussion of supermassive black hole (SMBH) spin in active
galactic nuclei (AGN). Pulling together all of the available XMM-Newton and
Suzaku results from the literature that satisfy objective quality control
criteria, it is clear that a large fraction of SMBHs are rapidly-spinning,
although there are tentative hints of a more slowly spinning population at high
(M>5*10^7Msun) and low (M<2*10^6Msun) mass. I also engage in a brief review of
the spins of stellar-mass black holes in X-ray binaries. In general,
reflection-based and continuum-fitting based spin measures are in agreement,
although there remain two objects (GROJ1655-40 and 4U1543-475) for which that
is not true. I end this review by discussing the exciting frontier of
relativistic reverberation, particularly the discovery of broad iron line
reverberation in XMM-Newton data for the Seyfert galaxies NGC4151, NGC7314 and
MCG-5-23-16. As well as confirming the basic paradigm of relativistic disk
reflection, this detection of reverberation demonstrates that future large-area
X-ray observatories such as LOFT will make tremendous progress in studies of
strong gravity using relativistic reverberation in AGN.Comment: 19 pages. To appear in proceedings of the ISSI-Bern workshop on "The
Physics of Accretion onto Black Holes" (8-12 Oct 2012). Revised version adds
a missing source to Table 1 and Fig.6 (IRAS13224-3809) and corrects the
referencing of the discovery of soft lags in 1H0707-495 (which were in fact
first reported in Fabian et al. 2009
Modifications of the Fine Structure of the Incisor Pulp of the Guinea Pig during Fxperimental Scurvy
Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68076/2/10.1177_00220345660450030301.pd
Online, Real-Time Tracking Using a Category-to-Individual Detector
A method for online, real-time tracking of objects is presented. Tracking is treated as a repeated detection problem where potential target objects are identified with a pre-trained category detector and object identity across frames is established by individual-specific detectors. The individual detectors are (re-)trained online from a single
positive example whenever there is a coincident category detection. This ensures that the tracker is robust to drift. Real-time operation is possible since an individual-object detector is obtained through elementary manipulations of the thresholds of the category detector and therefore only minimal additional computations are required. Our tracking algorithm is benchmarked against nine state-of-the-art trackers on two large, publicly available and challenging video datasets. We find that our algorithm is 10% more accurate and nearly as fast as the fastest of the competing algorithms, and it is as accurate but 20 times faster than the most accurate of the competing algorithms
Cyclotron effective masses in layered metals
Many layered metals such as quasi-two-dimensional organic molecular crystals
show properties consistent with a Fermi liquid description at low temperatures.
The effective masses extracted from the temperature dependence of the magnetic
oscillations observed in these materials are in the range, m^*_c/m_e \sim 1-7,
suggesting that these systems are strongly correlated. However, the ratio
m^*_c/m_e contains both the renormalization due to the electron-electron
interaction and the periodic potential of the lattice. We show that for any
quasi-two-dimensional band structure, the cyclotron mass is proportional to the
density of states at the Fermi energy. Due to Luttinger's theorem, this result
is also valid in the presence of interactions. We then evaluate m_c for several
model band structures for the \beta, \kappa, and \theta families of
(BEDT-TTF)_2X, where BEDT-TTF is bis-(ethylenedithia-tetrathiafulvalene) and X
is an anion. We find that for \kappa-(BEDT-TTF)_2X, the cyclotron mass of the
\beta-orbit, m^{*\beta}_c, is close to 2 m^{*\alpha}_c, where m^{*\alpha}_c is
the effective mass of the \alpha- orbit. This result is fairly insensitive to
the band structure details. For a wide range of materials we compare values of
the cyclotron mass deduced from band structure calculations to values deduced
from measurements of magnetic oscillations and the specific heat coefficient.Comment: 12 pages, 3 eps figure
Diminished Neural and Cognitive Responses to Facial Expressions of Disgust in Patients with Psoriasis: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study
Psoriasis produces significant psychosocial disability; however, little is understood about the neurocognitive mechanisms that mediate the adverse consequences of the social stigma associated with visible skin lesions, such as disgusted facial expressions of others. Both the feeling of disgust and the observation of disgust in others are known to activate the insula cortex. We investigated whether the social impact of psoriasis is associated with altered cognitive processing of disgust using (i) a covert recognition of faces task conducted using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and (ii) the facial expression recognition task (FERT), a decision-making task, conducted outside the scanner to assess the ability to recognize overtly different intensities of disgust. Thirteen right-handed male patients with psoriasis and 13 age-matched male controls were included. In the fMRI study, psoriasis patients had significantly (P<0.005) smaller signal responses to disgusted faces in the bilateral insular cortex compared with healthy controls. These data were corroborated by FERT, in that patients were less able than controls to identify all intensities of disgust tested. We hypothesize that patients with psoriasis, in this case male patients, develop a coping mechanism to protect them from stressful emotional responses by blocking the processing of disgusted facial expressions
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